On Wednesday, October 19, 2005, Apple Computer introduced Aperture, the first all-in-one post production tool that provides everything photographers need after the shoot. Aperture offers an advanced and incredibly fast RAW workflow that makes working with a camera’s RAW images as easy as JPEG. Built from the ground up for pros, Aperture features powerful compare and select tools, nondestructive image processing, color managed printing and custom web and book publishing.
“Aperture’s saving mechanism is different: it doesn’t, or at least not in the normal sense that we’re used to. Instead, whenever an edit is applied to an image, Aperture will note that editt in its database. The more edits you make, the more records are added to the database, where each record is an edit. If you need to modify or remove a previous edit, you track it down in the database, and either amend the record (thus amending the edit) or delete it (thus eliminating the edit). And all edits remain whether or not you consciously save them. In fact, Aperture does away with the common ‘Save’ command because the edits are already saved in the database! A “Save” command would be redundant,” Yuhui writes for Yuhui’s World of Wonder.
“This is A Good Thing™ because it does away with the ‘Oh drats’ situation. Imagine if you’re typing in, oh, OpenOffice and realise too late that you changed your client’s name when you shouldn’t have. And horrors! You don’t know how it’s actually spelled! You can’t call the client, because that would be embarrassing,” Yuhui writes. “If OpenOffice had an Aperture-like method of saving documents, you would be able to search through the database of changes, find the record that says ‘You renamed the client’s name to something idiotic’ and delete it. Boom! Your client’s name is back to what it was, and the rest of your document is as before.”
“And that is revolutionary. Yes, there is the ‘Undo’ function in most programs, but these destroy the changes that you ‘step back’ through. For example, if your mistake happened at change #10, you’ll have to undo the last 10 changes, then reapply the nine changes that come after #10. What happens if you forget what changes you made those nine times? Good luck,” Yuhui writes.
Yuhui writes, “Unfortunately, I don’t see something like this becoming more mainstream. Sad to say, a lot of mainstream programs are stuck in an innovation rut. But I hope that Apple will be able to extend this database-saving mechanism to the rest of its programs. Once other developers see how cool it is, then perhaps they’ll also implement it. And then the revolution will be complete.”
Full article here.
Advertisement: Introducing Aperture. Designed for professional photographers. $499. Free shipping.
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s iPhoto, which preceded Aperture, also has no “Save” command. iPhoto automatically saves changes to a photo, album, slideshow, or book as you work, so there’s no Save command. In a much more limited manner than Aperture, with iPhoto, if you don’t like the changes you’ve made to a photo, you can undo your most recent change by choosing Undo from the Edit menu. You can also revert to a photo’s original version by choosing “Revert to Original” from the Photos menu.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple’s Aperture more revolutionary than you might think – October 21, 2005
Apple’s new Aperture signals that Photoshop is no longer invulnerable – October 20, 2005
Pro photographers see Apple’s Aperture as complement to Adobe Photoshop – October 20, 2005
Does Apple’s Aperture threaten Adobe’s Photoshop? – October 20, 2005
Apple’s revolutionary new Aperture software a must have for every professional photographer – October 19, 2005
Apple introduces Aperture, first all-in-one post production tool for photographers – October 19, 2005
Balmy
Apple has always been so innovative in so many things it does, be it hardware or software, seem like one of the very few really innovative companies these days that actually innovate…, only if other companies are also using their head eh, actually they are but sadly to knock off… hm,
A save command in iPhoto would be welcome, editing on iPhoto books is only saved when quitting. I can’t tell you how often I finished five or six pages before iPhoto crashed and reopened it to find the edits completely gone. A save command would be a welcome addition as far as I’m concerned.
This could be very interesting. Even for collaborative word documents, instead of having to keep multiple copies of successive edits, you could store everything in one file, with bookmarks in place to signify major milestones.
Even for an amateur photographer like myself, some of the features of Aperture would be great. The printing and organizational aspects are very cool. Way better than iPhoto
FileMaker Pro has always been like that. There is no ‘Save’ button.
I think the limitation with iPhoto is that it makes multiple copies of edited images, whereas Apertures simply keeps track of the changes.
Go to the iPhoto directory in Pictures and located a picture you’ve imported. Let’s say it’s called “mypicture.jpg.” Then, in iPhoto, crop the picture and turn it sepia. You’ll notice that iPhoto then “saves” these changes and movies “mypicture.jpg” into a new folder called “Originals” while a new file of cropped sepia edit replaces “mypicture” at that directory level.
So, if you have one source image and 5 different version, in iPhoto you have a total of 6 different image files.
Not so in Aperture.
It’s in no way comparable to iPhoto and Aperture is infinitely more scalable without gobbling up disk space like iPhoto does. iPhoto is actually a traditional way of doing versioning, by creating separate files to represent each version. Aperture goes way beyond this.
How is all this different from waht Photoshop already does? Seems like the writer has never used any other pro graphics app.
FileMaker User,
Just because both apps lack a “Save” function doesn’t mean they are the same thing. I think the point is not that the databases are new, but that Aperture turns the whole notion of source images and versioning on its head by seemlessly integrating the power of a relational database. . Yo
I think we saw some of these technologies in Motion and Final Cut Pro with the real-time previews, but Aperture seems to take things to a new level by eliminating the need for saves and even the idea of previews at all. All changes and effects are generated on-the-fly dynamically.
Think of a photorealistic scene in Doom 3. You have a base collection of texture and lighting maps and Doom’s rendering engine builds that scene on-the-fly. You can then go in and edit a couple of parameters in a text file and totally change the look of that scene: lower the light, add fog, increase the reflectivity of the surfaces and Doom’s engine will build that new scene just as easily as the original by reading a few paramenter settings. You don’t need to create another full copy of Doom to create a different looks for the scene.
Now add a rewind button that you can scrub through instead of having save points.
The analogy isn’t perfect because a game like Doom is time-based, whereas you can remove edit #3 and edit #8 in Aperture and the integrity of that version will be fine (although it will obviously look different).
In short, Aperture’s approach to workflows does look quite revolutionary. A few years from now, everyone will be wondering why anyone had to do things the old way.
How is all this different from waht Photoshop already does? Seems like the writer has never used any other pro graphics app.
It is totally different.
In Photoshop, let’s say you start with a 10 MB image. You save this as “original.psd.”
Now you want to create a black and white version of image for a newspaper print ad. So you open up “original.psd”, create a layer and desaturate it appropriately. You don’t want to alter the original image and you also want to keep the black and white image in a “newspaper ad” folder, so you create a NEW file called “bw_version.psd.”
Now you want to create a full-color version with a bunch of different effects that involves multiple layers. You have a layer to control levels, another layer to control hue, another layer to control contrast. Then you add a mask layer. You now want to apply a blur. Oops! You have to copy the image layer, apply the blur, and wham, before you know it, the file size balloons from 10 MB to 300 MB [and] save yet another new file called “print_version_1.psd”
Do this several more times, and you end up with multiple files that are eating up gigabytes of disk space. Just opening a file takes a long time. And any time you want to create a new version, it involves adding more layers, manually turning off the ones you don’t want to see, and then saving yet another file.
Aperture eliminates this.
Again, it’s not a Photoshop competitor because Aperture is not a pixel editor. But if you’ve used Photoshop, you would clearly see that Photoshop is completely lacking in terms of file size, version control, and image management. Photoshop can manipulate images like no other, but it doesn’t even begin to address workflow issues. That’s the difference.
FileMaker doesn’t have a Save command – other than the Save a copy as …… command.
FileMaker has been around for many years.
It would be nice if iPhoto gets versions, cause I believe it still makes new copies from the original
Ummm, Windows has desktop search, too, via things like Google Desktop and MSN software add-ons. But that don’t make it Spotlight. You could also say that Windows does windows, too, but that doesn’t make it a Mac.
The fact that FileMaker doesn’t have a Save command is not the point. The point is that Aperture leverages the power of relational databases in a way that appears to be quite unique. I’m pretty sure the nondestructive image editing feature and versioning via Stacks is a first because it is only made possible by combining a relational database with CoreImage functionality.
Revolutionary ? ever used mainframe editors, e.g emacs ?
iPhoto does have a Save command, but it’s just not called Save.
When you edit a photo in iPhoto, thumbnails go on top of the window while the photo that’s being edited fills the main window. When you’re done, you click the Done button. That’s when the save occurs.
I love it <not> when people only look for the obvious, then conclude that what they are looking for just doesn’t exist at all.
And yes, there are times when I’ve made 10 changes and to amend one change, say at edit#3, I have to undo 7 edits to get there, then redo the edits I wanted to keep.
So, yes, I’m looking forward to being implemented in iPhoto… and maybe all of Apple’s apps. I thinks it’s a wonderful idea.
sounds good, bring it on. it will kick adobe in the butt, since workflow is so important within their apps and we’re all conditioned to a certain amount of layer-spawning/save-as drugery. recent patents made by apple point to very innovative ways they are looking at relational databases for the basic desktop workspace/UI too.
The closest thing PhotoShop has to this is a useful but mostly forgotten PS feature called “Adjustment Layers” where the changes are commands on top of the photo but does not alter the original photo till you flatten it.
One big difference, aside from the what’s available in Adjustment Layers, is the file size. When you add Adjustment Layers in PhotoShop the file size goes way up!
Question. Can you use masks (or selections with feather) to select what part of the photo is adjusted in Aperture? Burn and dodge would be one example.
looks amazing but system requirements are pretty steep…… does make we want to trade in my old film cameras for digital though, so fed up of the quality of scans at the labs down here.
maybe i could look for a decent place that scans in raw…….. hmmmmmm
Am i being picky but why do they crop off the apple tool bar? i dont think they are going to make this platform agnostic, so maybe its to hook the punter before he realises his pc wont run it, take a look they are very careful you dont really see much of the apple toolbar, especailly on the zooms to it which exclude the apple logo.
all in all i think xrez and live picture have in part been reincarnated which is a good thing
I think this will be the next major innovation to be copied by Microsoft for the next versions of Office, Windows, etc.
It is revolutionary because more complicated workflows will use less hard drive space than they did before.
This will make it possible to use something like a 1.8 inch hard drive in a laptop without losing any of the functionality.
This is a huge innovation and Apple should implement it all over the next version of OS X.
Isn’t this also what Core Image Fun House does? I’ve played around with it, and the effects act in sort of the same way.
Hey everyone, thanks for the comments! It’s great to read them and learn more about other cool tools out there with the same database-saving feature.
I’ve never touched up my photos in iPhoto, so I wasn’t aware of a similar function there. However, as NewType and MacSmiley have pointed out, iPhoto does employ some sort of file backup mechanism. So it’s not exactly like what Aperture has, but close enough.
BTW Filemaker is a database, therefore it is implied that it won’t have a “Save” function. Same goes for other DB apps, e.g. MySQL, MS Access, etc.
iPhoto may not have a save command but it needs it, like other users out there i’ve found the program crashes regularly if books are being made or some edits. The only way I can get around it is to quit and restart over and over. I suspect that a lack of ram may cause the problem but i am using 750+megs!
So… what if Aperature crashes after you have been working on a set of images for lets say an hour. I guess your screwed.
Nice to see Apple leading the way again. I wonder why Aperture needs such high specced equipment if *changes* rather than *files* are saved?
Doesn’t matter if it does everything plus wash the car, if I can’t take it with me using ANY current Powerbook sold today, it’s staying on the shelf.
This isn’t about the triviality of simply eliminating the save command and substituting an undo button. That would just the same as an autosave feature into a database instead of a file system.
The key here is that the database implemented with Aperture doesn’t save successive versions of your photo as you make changes. It saves the actions you take to make those changes.
In iPhoto, when you make any change to a photo, the filesize of the database/filesystem increases by one full photo size, and you have no way to go back later and apply the change to a different version of the photo. The iPhoto model (like the Filemaker model) is what you might call Autosave.
Implementing the action-to-database model in a wordprocessor would be revolutionary. The currently standard ‘sequential undo’ method is very restrictive.
Um, Professional MOBILE Photographer, guess you can shoot, but not read? It works fine with PBs. Apple min system requirements are very clear:
—————-
Minimum System Requirements
One of the following Macintosh computers:
Power Mac G5 with a 1.8 gigahertz (GHz) or faster PowerPC G5 processor
17- or 20-inch iMac G5 with a 1.8 GHz or faster PowerPC G5 processor
15- or 17-inch PowerBook G4 with a 1.25 GHz or faster PowerPC G4 processor1GB of RAM
One of the following graphics cards:
-ATI Radeon x600 Pro or x600 XT
-ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition
-ATI Radeon X850 XT
-ATI Radeon 9800 XT or 9800 Pro
-ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
-ATI Radeon 9600, 9600 XT, 9600 Pro, or 9650
-ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 or 9600
-NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE or 6600
-NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL or 6800 GT DDL
-NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
-NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500
5GB of disk space for application, templates, and tutorial
DVD drive for installation
—————-
I have two PBs that meet those requirements. Surely as a pro, you do too?